


Mapped

by Owlship



Series: Lifelines (Soulmate Fics) [2]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Childbirth, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied Relationships, Minor Original Character(s), Past Max/Jessie Rockatansky, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Canon, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 05:20:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4466909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlship/pseuds/Owlship
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The universe marks the first words your soulmate will say onto your skin; it gives no clues as to what comes after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mapped

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Mirrored](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4150047) by [Owlship](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlship/pseuds/Owlship). 



> I don't know okay, this just happened.
> 
> Additional warnings for brief suicidal impulse/thoughts, some references to body horror/birth defects, discussion of abortion, and implied past child death.
> 
> This is a sequel to [Mirrored](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4150047) but can probably stand on its own.

 

Max's Words came in a month after he was born. Neat, almost delicate letters encircling his knee that he would find himself copying when schoolwork proved more boring than he could handle. His eventual choice of a career was a foregone conclusion, really, when one considered what the Words etched into his skin said.

He pulled Jessie over on a routine traffic stop, her bright red convertible flashing in the summer's sun like a beacon. “Miss, just how far above the speed limit do you think you were going?”

She laughed high and light, her reply almost smothered by mirth. “Haven't a clue, Officer- why don't you tell me over coffee?”

It took a second for Max's brain to process her words as anything other than a transparent attempt to get out of a well-deserved ticket, but then it registered and he'd joined in with her laughter. He ended up waiving the fine anyway, in exchange for dinner and a promise that her days of speeding past unsuspecting cops were in the past.

Nothing in the wake of the global resource wars could be called easy, but with her by his side life was bearable. They had a house with a view to the dwindling sea and together created a beautiful son, and when the road freaks got more and more people snarled up in their death races he could find solace in her arms.

But then the world went just a little more mad, and everything fell to pieces.

 

His second set of Words brand themselves onto his flesh some unknowable number of years after the old world finally dies. He's parked on the edge of what used to be a beach, staring into the vast salt plains that make up the new oceans and contemplating whether it would be worth it to catch the mongrel dog he can see lurking around the rocky shoreline. The sudden flare of pain takes him by surprise, sends him stumbling back to the shelter of his car until it passes long minutes later.

His knee throbs in time with his heart, and he knows what this is. If the pain burning into his side had been caused by an ambusher shooting at him it would have been a mercy compared to the betrayal the ache truly represents. Jessie is long dead but she's the only one that was supposed to have any claim on his soul- she and the rest of the ghosts he's collected.

“Read them,” she whispers coldly from the backseat, so unlike the way she sounded when they first met. Max thinks about pulling out the shotgun, of driving off one of the nearby cliffs, of the bundle of dynamite strapped to the fuel tanks. “Read them,” Jessie repeats louder, waking the child that sleeps in her ruined arms to stare at him with blank accusing eyes, and he has no choice.

These Words are written in a much harsher hand, none of the soft flourishes he could still trace by heart, all sharp angles and ugly letters. “Kill switches; I set the sequence myself.” The sound of his own voice is strange in the still air, rips asunder the shreds of peace clinging to the beach.

The dog flees at the noise, a dark shadow running out into the salt. In the car Jessie lets out a cruel mockery of a laugh. “Dirty thief! Some policeman you turned out to be.”

Max thinks about how this is perhaps the most fitting punishment the world could have handed down to him. He could put a bullet straight into his brain and it wouldn't be enough to stop fate from demanding he somehow hear the Words spoken aloud. Now that they're etched into his skin his life stretches out before him, a vast wasteland with not even the faintest hope of rest.

He starts the engine and steers the car away from the barren ocean.

 

\--

 

Once a newborn's health is assured and its sex determined, the next natural thing for the new mother and birth-attendants to do is check for Words. Will the child be born into the world with a soulmate, or will they have to wait to know their fate?

When Dag's baby finally finishes clawing its bloody way out of her womb, Words are the last thing on her mind. She's exhausted to the very marrow of her bones, the pain echoing all around her body only amplified by the sprog's horrendous wailing. What she wants is to be left alone to sleep- possibly for as long as it takes for the brat to grow up enough to speak instead of screaming for all its needs.

The garden spins around her while she fights to get her bearings. Her cunt feels as if it split in two, her entire torso aching with the strain of pushing for so long. The old Vuvalini Sawbones is kneeling right in the bloody earth besides Dag to fuss over the infant, turning it round and muttering to herself a list of words that Dag's mind can't grab hold of but sound ominous all the same. It's obviously got a set of healthy lungs from the way it's shrieking bloody murder, more's the pity.

Now that the worst of the pain has settled from razor-sharp highs to a dull throbbing ache, she wonders if maybe she was wrong not to have taken Keeper's indirect advice about ridding her body of the creature early on. It would have spared her this ripped-apart feeling, as if she's lost something she wasn't aware of having in the first place. What little time she and her soulmate had spent together was mostly focused on the seeds contained within the old woman's satchel, the plants they could sprout if the soil was rich enough and the care diligent. There was a journal full of crabbed writing and meticulous diagrams tucked into the bottom of the bag that held a great many more details- an intimate look into both the Keeper of the Seed's carefully hoarded herblore and a record of the many days the woman herself had lived.

“Is that a birthmark?” Toast whispers just loud enough for the words to catch in Dag's ear. She's in no position to look even if she had the desire to, is curled up on her side in a bid to hold all the rest of her insides together.

The page that had immediately caught her eye, after she had dutifully searched out remedies for blood-loss and lung infections, was the one given over to the process of ending pregnancies. Dag hated the spawn that grew within her womb and reverently traced the words over and over, daring herself to take the necessary steps. “Fresh Strychnine Bush berries... Pulverized seeds of the Cymbidium Orchid... Smoked Eucalyptus bark...” Such simple remedies, just a quick potion or two and the little Warlord-to-be would instead be a distant memory. There was even an elegant jar labeled “Cymbidium” with a measure of seeds just waiting to be added to a tonic.

“Doesn't look like any I've seen...” Capable answers, positioned further back from the squalling baby than the rest. Sensible of her, Dag thinks, wishing she could step away from it all herself.

But... It could be a girl, Keeper had said. What better trick to play on that rotting smeg than to prove his last attempt at immortality had failed completely? Girl children were never seen after birth when he'd had a say in things, certainly never would have been allowed to hold any power. The seeds could be planted for others to use in the future, those who don't have the luxuries Dag has access to. Her patch of desert has water and food- enough to feed an extra mouth, at least. And she herself has no lumps or bumps, no twisted limbs or irradiated bones- her offspring could grow to be strong if allowed the proper tending, no matter the bloodline.

“Dag, don't you want to hold your baby?” Cheedo asks, smiling at Dag as if she's done something far more impressive than let a few kilograms of meat tear out of her body. She's holding the sprog with such a pleased expression that Dag reluctantly drags her body upright to rest against the pile of pillows that had appeared at some point in the chaos. She holds out her arms to accept the infant, brings it to her swollen breast and allows it to root around for a nipple.

“It's a girl,” Cheedo says with triumph in her voice, “Not another Joe at all.” The child is ugly enough to be his get, Dag thinks, but it's hard to imagine this small crumple-faced thing being capable of much evil. With its mouth occupied it can't even scream. “And look, how pretty her birthmark is!”

On the infant's leg is a strange reddish-black marking, bold enough to be mistaken for Words except that the graceful curving lines don't coalesce into letters at all.

“It's a plant,” Dag says with some surprise, recognizing the shape easily from one of Keeper's diagrams, “Sorghum.”

“Why does she have a picture on her?” Capable asks, still hovering a bit away from where Dag's sprawled out in the aftermath, leery of getting too close.

It's Sawbones who answers, with the knowledge of years gone by. “That's her soul-mark of course. Not everyone knows how to read and write, do they?”

“Words without words?” Dag says, staring down at the infant with a fission of curiosity. The scar where her own Words had burned away throbs beneath her hair as she contemplates the possibilities.

What sort of a soulmate does this child have in her future? Platonic like her and Keeper, or the more traditional romance Capable and her doomed Nux shared? If they don't know how to write they won't come from the Citadel-turned-Oasis, not when the Pups and even the Wretched are being taught as resources allow. And such a perfect match to Keeper's dedicated sketches... It must be a positive omen, she decides.

“A bit trickier than that,” the old woman replies, reaching out to adjust Dag's hold on the suckling child. The pull at her breast increases in strength, a visceral sensation of giving that feels only slightly less daunting than she imagined it would. “There were studies, back Before, about such things. Even in the 'civilized world' someone might be marked with symbols instead of proper Words. But they know when they meet their match all the same.”

A smile creeps over Dag's face for the first time since she realized the birth was imminent. It finally occurs to her that her daughter would truly become her own person one day, would meet someone who speaks of plants and growing things, would have the chance to be loved. Not anything like Joe at all, really.

“What's her name?” Cheedo asks, gently stroking the pale fuzz on top of the infant's head with a besotted expression.

Dag hadn't considered it at all, had for as long as possible pushed the thought of the baby being anything but an abstract idea as far outside her mind as she could. She thinks now about Keeper's birth name, tucked into the spine of her journal like a precious secret, of the name her own mother gave her so many moons ago, of all the women she's seen torn to pieces by this ugly world. Decides against naming her child for the dead, chooses instead something living and resilient.

“Dandelion,” she says, picturing the stubborn yellow flowers that cling to life even where they're not wanted, beautiful for their resistance.

 

\--

 

“Does it ever stop hurting?” Capable asks, hands anxious rubbing at the arch of her foot. The Words burned when they appeared and they burn now, have been burning since the very second the light left Nux's eyes.

Max looks startled to be addressed, jerks his head up from where he's hunched over the engine of someone's bike. His eyes dart down to the gnarled scar her hands only half cover before meeting her gaze, expression sympathetic.

“No.”

It's not the answer she wanted to hear but it's not one that comes as a surprise either. There are plenty of Free Boys with the angry red scars that indicate a lost soulmate underneath their paint, but they never seem bothered- too used to the mundane pain of their half-lives and comforted by the fervent belief that whoever their match was, they're now living eternal in Valhalla, awaiting their reunion. No one except perhaps Furiosa speaks to Max about his second set of burned Words, the ones that blend in with the faded scars of an old injury, but their existence has become an open secret all the same.

“Does it help to have another soulmate?”

A daring question, one he might not answer. He stops looking at the bike's engine entirely, passes a spanner between his hands contemplatively while he gathers his words. Max's silences are shorter these days than when he first crashed into their lives, but they'd all learned the signs of him thinking things through well enough to know when not to interrupt.

Finally he shakes his head, “I was angry. Thought it would mean forgetting.” He pauses, eyes focused on some point in the distance only he can see. “You don't forget your soulmate. Can't. It hurts but it's _their_ pain.”

“But what if all you can remember is the pain?”

It's only been 427 days since Nux died and already Capable can't remember the way his voice sounded, or picture the exact color of his eyes. She had only three days to know him, three days weighed against a coming lifetime of scars that burn with every step she makes. In the dark of night she fears that she'll grow to hate him for the burned Words he left behind.

Before everything, she had no love for the Words etched into her skin, speaking praise for a vile man that could only have come from a true believer. She had outright loathed whoever her soulmate was just for implying that she should have anything in common with such a sycophant, no matter how often Angharad had tried to convince her that Joe's “soldiers” were no more than cogs in his sadistic machine, the same as them. If she'd hated Nux before she knew him and hates the pain he left now that he's gone, how can she not grow to hate him entirely?

Max hums lowly, his eyes soft and understanding when he meets her gaze again. This time it's her who looks away to the tangle of machinery between them. “You didn't have much time,” he says in acknowledgment. “What you did have... that's not what hurts. Those are the memories you keep.”

What she had, Capable thinks, is nothing more than half-remembered dreams now. When she manages to sleep she doesn't have screaming nightmares the way her sisters often do- of course she sometimes relives Joe abusing her body or cradles in her arms the twisted mass of flesh she once birthed for him, how could she not?- but mostly she dreams of a cold night under the starry sky, of a warm embrace keeping away the chill, gentle kisses against scarred lips.

She never dreams about how badly Nux's Words ripped at her soul whenever she'd catch sight of them in the Vault, doesn't feel the throbbing wreck of scars he left in the aftermath. It's his arms around her shoulders that she remembers when she dreams, not what he said exactly but how the words made her feel- like she was safe to be completely honest, like there was hope for a future.

It had seemed like a cold comfort, reliving the few precious moments they spent together night after night- but maybe it could be a way to keep alive the best parts of who Nux was, who they could have been together. She doesn't have hundreds of days worth of memories like Max has, but perhaps for her the dreams will be enough to keep her sane. With a fortifying breath Capable lets her foot drop from her hands, unfolds from her perch until she's standing before the partially disassembled motorcycle.

She peers at the section Max was working on before she interrupted him, and after a minute of fruitless observation points to a component at random.

“Should that valve be bent like that?”

He gives her a small smile in return, and begins to haltingly explain the work he's doing so that she can follow along.

 

\--

 

A roiling mass anxiety in her gut keeps Furiosa awake long after Max drifts off on the bed besides her. In sleep he has none of the vitality she's used to seeing, all his restless energy finally calmed, and the stillness is usually a welcome respite. On this night her eyes keep track of the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, her mind fixated on the simple fact that one day his heart will stop beating and she won't have any way to know.

She had been in a workshop fixing up a rig when one of the blackthumbs besides her keeled over, clutching his side and keening. Her immediate thought was that he had injured himself, but when she peeled his hands away there was only scarred-over flesh to be seen.

“He's gone,” the boy had whispered hoarsely, eyes full of a strange mix of pride and pain, “Reg's gone to Valhalla.”

The reality took a second to sink in before the other Repair Boys raised their hands in the V8 symbol, called out their Witnessing. The boy's Words had burned away the instant his soulmate died, an unmistakable way to mark their passing.

Some mechanism deep inside of her had caught with a jerk, left her breathless as she watched the blackthumbs crowd around the boy, congratulating and consoling him by turns. Furiosa pivoted away from the sight, faced the engine block as if to continue working now that she knew there was no injury to be treated.

Her ruined arm ached for the rest of the day, eventually collecting a mess of long red scratches where her nails dug into the skin. Max had fussed over the marks with quiet dedication when they retired for the night, not drawing attention to it until after they were alone.

When your soulmate dies, the Words on your skin burn away. She'd never given it much thought before meeting Max, who once confessed that having his flesh etched with two sets of scars would be more than he could bear. That keeping her alive was one of the ways he ensured his own survival.

If Max dies, Furiosa won't feel it.

When Joe dragged her to the Organic Mechanic to have the bloody stump of her arm stitched shut, he made absolutely sure that no trace of her Word remained. It hadn't mattered to her then, nor the days that followed when her own survival was paramount. The War Boys she let it slip to even saw it as a blessing- she had someone to Witness her, but she wouldn't be “distracted” by their death in turn.

Now this supposed blessing feels like the curse it was always meant to be. What she and Max are building together is new and fragile still, but she doesn't doubt that his loss would cut her to the bone. Furiosa knows she will be able survive his death, but to not be aware of the event until told by someone else- that has the potential to break her.

“I can hear you thinking,” Max says softly, half muffled where his face is pressed warm and heavy into her side. He shifts his head enough to look her in the eye, brings a hand to rest ever so gently against the end of her stump. “Hurting still?”

She shakes her head in reply, threads her fingers through his sleep-mussed hair. “Sorry to keep you awake.” He hums, expression quietly concerned, and she tries to find words to reassure him well enough so that at least one of them could find rest.

“One of the blackthumbs lost his soulmate today,” Furiosa says instead, surprising herself. “His Words scarred right before my eyes.”

Max is quiet for a moment before letting out an understanding noise and moving so he's sitting up next to her. “Your Word was on your arm,” he says, thumb running over the scabbed-over scratches he had cleaned so diligently earlier.

Furiosa closes her eyes against the intensity of his gaze and nods, the gesture swallowed by the shadowy room. “I won't be able to tell. When you- How will I _know_?” The question is torn out of her unwillingly and she feels exposed, flayed open by the looming certainty of it. Because unless the wasteland takes her first it's bound to happen- everything precious to her gets ripped away eventually- and she won't even know unless someone finds his body.

The bed creaks as Max shifts again, a warm hand coming up to cup her jaw. He dips his forehead to meet hers, breaths mingling in the space between them. Furiosa reaches out to grab the front of his shirt, wraps her left arm around his ribs until his chest is pressed close to hers and her face is tucked into the crook of his neck.

She lets herself cling to him for a long moment, heartbeats synching in the quiet of the room, allows the distress she feels to ebb and flow until it no longer threatens to drown her. When Furiosa pulls away Max looks awed by how vulnerable she's making herself, how much the admission of fear cost her, until his expression blends to one of the sort of tenderness neither of them expresses often.

"It's not skin deep," he says hesitantly. "I can't promise much, but Furi..." Reflexively she scowls at hearing the god-awful nickname, the one he normally saves for teasing because of how she hates it, and his mouth quirks into a faint smile in reply. "They're call soulmates for a reason."

 

\--

 

Underneath the rest of her injuries the burn is negligible. Toast doesn't even realize that Words have emblazoned themselves across her skin until someone points them out, more concerned with making sure she picks out all of the remaining lead shot in her leg. What should have been an easy trade run turned into an ambush, some pissant scavengers thinking an Oasis convoy headed _to_ the Bullet Farm would be lightly armed and ripe for the taking.

She'd shown them, taking out the leader herself with a well-aimed knife through the eye, though they'd still lost two of their outriders and she's taken a few hits herself. Nothing that won't heal- and they'd gained a shiny new rig to tow home.

“Imperator, may I read them to you?” Her second-in-command Snip asks from where he's crouched behind her on the carcass of the pillager's vehicle.

“Read what?” she snaps in reply, not taking her eyes off of the delicate tweezer work she's doing.

“Your Words Boss, you've got your Words!” Once such a thing would have been a cause for shame amongst the Free Boys, a sign of your lack of devotion to the Immortan and the mighty V8. Now Snip's tone is reverent as he draws attention to the Words scrawled along the length of her spine, visible in patches where her shirt had ripped in the scuffle.

“Knock yourself out,” she says, affecting an unconcerned tone to hide the way she feels as if the ground has just dropped out from underneath her. Toast has lived for almost eleven-thousand days Blank, long enough to take comfort in the impenetrability it grants her. The thought that she has a soulmate somewhere in the world shakes her to her core with how much it terrifies her. It's not something she can shake off when it's etched into her very skin.

Snip lightly pulls the back of her shirt from her back, exposing the line of script she can feel burning like her long-ago brand, marking her once more as something less than truly her own.

“'I've got your six', that's what they say,” he reads approvingly, “Strong words. Neat writing too, none of Thermo's chicken-scratch.” He turns his head and raises his voice at the end to taunt his own soulmate, who jeers back goodnaturedly from further down the rig.

“Go crash, you rustbucket! Yer's is worst!”

“Eat my exhaust!”

Toast would normally smile at the pair's back-and-forth but the seizing engine in her chest renders her immobile. She hasn't ever wanted Words- not since she was a small child and learned what having a soulmate really meant, the ways they could be used to hurt you. Knowing that somewhere out in the world is a person who would be able to find their way past her carefully maintained defenses is unbearable, and she's struck with the urge to claw away at the marking until it's gone, buried under scars of her own making.

“Are we ready to move on?” Toast asks instead of screaming, forcing Snip's attention back to the matter of handling the clean-up.

There's a pause while he accounts for their circled vehicles and crew, and she resumes picking out the last of the shot with hands that she refuses to let shake. “They're still patching up Crank, but it looks like the rig is fixed.”

Toast nods and picks up a length of clean-enough cloth, bandages her leg brusquely. “Leave Crank and three others, we need to get to the Farm before they think we're skipping. We'll pick them up on our way back.”

The skirmish caused them to drift off the proper hard-packed roadway, but not far enough to cause much more of a delay. She tests the strength of her leg and finds it well enough to hold her weight, clambers back to her perch on top of the rig's cab.

“You're really not going to stop an' celebrate, are you?” Snip asks with a tinge of disbelief, settling back into the driver's seat once her orders have been passed along.

“Of course not,” she says, “They're just Words, and we have work to do.”

“If you say so,” he replies, starting the engine.

The burning has faded almost entirely, and with the position they're in Toast will never catch sight of the marking without trying. If no one else manages to see them, she might never have to think about her Words again. And if her soulmate really is a perfect match like the stories say- well then, they'll understand when she walks away from their meeting without looking back.

 

\--

 

When she was a child Cheedo longed for the day her Words would come in. She was promised to a Blank man but she hoped that maybe, just maybe he had Words for her and they only needed to meet for them to appear. After her first night in the Vault it became clear that her soulmate would have to come from the outside, perhaps a rich trading partner of Joe's who would see her and know her for their match.

In the War Rig after Angharad fell, Cheedo thought maybe it was her destiny to die as well, that she simply wouldn't be given enough time to meet her soulmate. In a moment of terror she tried to return to Joe, to the Vault where he kept all his treasured things safe in hopes of stopping the desert from devouring her whole. But she remained in the wasteland with her sisters, surviving gunfights and explosions to return to the Citadel once more, skin as Blank as ever. Perhaps then it was her soulmate who perished, crushed beneath the wheels that brought her to freedom.

She had always found it fascinating to watch the way soulmates interact, made a point of studying how even the briefest connection can turn someone's heart to ash or act as a salvation. Part of her wonders if she doesn't have the depth for it. The soaring heights are enticing but giving so much of your heart and soul over to another person when one slip brings it all crashing down takes courage she fears she lacks. The universe must take such things into account, and found not a soul that would match with her own shortcomings.

 

“Why is it so important to you?” Capable asks, eyes no longer quite as bright as Cheedo remembers them being. “It's not always happily-ever-after.”

She shocks all of them except perhaps Max by disappearing into the desert one day not long after. When Capable returns she looks more settled in her skin, less haunted- but the wasteland's siren song has gripped something inside of her because never makes it all the way home again, is always venturing back to the shifting sands before long.

 

When Cheedo learns that Words need not take the form of words at all, she can't help but spend a day with a mirror going over every inch of skin. Surely she has some symbol tucked away, dismissed until now as a mere birthmark. After hours of searching she has to admit defeat- she is as Blank as the day she was born and the confirmation brings sour tears to her eyes, forces choking sobs out of her that she tries in vain to stifle.

Her crying sets off Dandelion in the next room and forces her to hastily dry her tears, rushing over to take the infant into her arms before her mother wakes as well and asks what the matter is. Cheedo coos and make silly faces down at the fussing babe until the both of them are laughing, and she wonders if maybe this love she feels isn't enough to make up for the universe's oversight.

She begins to spend most of her time with the young ones, a penance for every bright-eyed Pup who announces that their Words have come in setting off guilty waves of envy in her gut. The tangle of emotions that surface is unmanageable at first, but it becomes easier to bear as the days of her life pile up. Watching soulmates find each other is a strangely aching sort of joy, a glimpse into something she'll never have for herself but gets to share in part all the same.

Dag's sweet Dandelion grows like the weed she was named for, every day one step closer to finding her match, and she's so dear to Cheedo's heart that she suspects hers will be the hardest pair to watch form. Without the clarity of Words no one is quite sure how she'll know her soulmate, and Cheedo aches to think of her being mistaken and risking her heart for the wrong person. Even then- matched Words don't guarantee happy soulmates. This pair of Free Boys hate one another on sight and nothing can be done but to keep them separate, this Pup fears his older soulmate and cries whenever she so much as looks his way, these two might as well not have had Words in the first place for all they care. It's a web of human desires that gets more tangled the deeper she delves, until Cheedo is no longer sure which way is up.

 

“Better to be Blank than offer yourself up on a platter,” Toast says, face closed off and posture defensive. “Safer, anyway.”

The existence of Toast's Words gets uncovered by mistake, when the road war that revealed her match results in injuries that can't be tended to by herself. Cheedo is one of the only ones she allows near to care for her wounds, her ability to hold a secret assured by long experience- so unlike the flighty girl she once was. Toast's soulmate doesn't make it to the Oasis at all, only the healthy gleam of letters etched into skin attesting to their continued survival. Though she never speaks of it, Toast seems glad for the distance.

 

It's not that Cheedo doesn't have lovers to share her bed with or the unconditional love of her sisters to depend upon, but she suspects there will always be a part of her wondering what if. What if she really did have a soulmate, even one who then died? What if she'd really belonged to Dag, or Angharad, or even- she shudders to recall her long-ago delight at the notion- Joe? If she had a burning scar to carry on her skin would it be better than the terrible blankness that weighs on her soul?

Watching Dag's daughter find her soulmate turns out to be one of the happiest days Cheedo can recall, just for seeing the joy that lights up the girl's face. Dandelion seems so young at hardly more than seven-and-a-half-thousand days past her first breath, but she's already taken over the title of Keeper of the Seeds from her mother. It's strange to find herself thinking of Seed as young when she's already many days older than Cheedo was when she helped form the Oasis, but watching her grow up means she'll always be in part the sweet child of days long past.

The boy looks more his age, desert-thin with dark liquid eyes that reveal more than his words do. As a token of goodwill from his tribe he presents to Seed a sprig of sorghum with grains ripe from the harvest, a perfect match to the stalk that's been displayed on her leg since birth. Seed's acerbic reply was in turn etched into his skin though he has no knowledge of letters, and by sundown they had argued over what seems like every plant contained in the Oasis' many gardens. Watching her fully bloom to her destiny should have sent a sharp spike of bittersweet pain into Cheedo's chest, but she is only aware of sharing in the delight of such a well-made match.

 

“It's not so different from any relationship,” Furiosa says, her hand slowly carding through Max's grayed hair where he sits sprawled at her feet. “There's a... certainty to it, I suppose.” Max hums but says nothing, and Cheedo knows better than to press for words he doesn't offer.

No one is surprised when eventually the two of them simply fail to return from one of their excursions into the wasteland. The battered but trustworthy car they'd built together drives unsteadily up to the gates with a passel of refugee children inside instead of its owners, fearful of their own shadows but talking in reverent tones about the pair of desert spirits who battled a dragon to rescue them.

 

Sometimes the old fears rear their head, even when Cheedo has had thousands of days to prove to herself how silly it is to hold out for a set of Words. Seed's firstborn is a gnarled thing with Words wrapped around her struggling ribs despite her inauspicious shape; her second a perfectly formed boy as Blank as Cheedo herself. She can't help but fret over the child as she once did for herself, wondering if he's destined for an early grave or a lifetime of loneliness, if some twist of fate would have him become heir to Joe's attempted dynasty after all. He takes in everything around him with bright eyes and says almost nothing in reply, but as he grows he is gentle and kind and most importantly, he is happy.

And when Cheedo is old and gray and no longer cares very much for anything except the children who crowd around her knees to hear her tell stories of the past, she finally asks the Dag her opinion on the matter.

“Oh darling,” Dag says with a laugh on her tongue, wraps her arms tight around Cheedo in a familiar embrace. “Dear one, if the universe had tried to give you Words to show how loved you are, your skin wouldn't possibly have the room to contain them all.”

And somehow, she finds that it's enough.

 


End file.
